by Sung J. Woo
“So if I’m an O and I matched three with my dad, how come it won’t take?”
“Well, that’s the thing,” Dr. Elias said. “You don’t match at all.”
“No match?”
“Not one.”
“I don’t understand.”
Then Dr. Elias said the words that Kevin kept hearing in his head on his way over to Judy’s: “What it means is that your father is not your biological father.”
My father, not my biological, Kevin thought. I almost failed biology in high school. Maybe if I had done better, this wouldn’t have happened. Maybe if . . .
Dr. Elias asked if he was still on the line.
“I’m here. I’m just . . . okay. All right.”
“I’m terribly sorry to be the one to tell you this, Kevin, I really am. Information of this nature should’ve come from your parents, but I figured you deserved to know.”
He’d thanked Dr. Elias and hung up as fast as he could. He was grateful that a boy came in to have his racquet restrung, glad to perform a familiar physical act to bring himself into some sort of equilibrium. Babolat co-poly on the mains, the strings that ran vertically, forty-nine pounds per square inch; Wilson synthetic gut on the crosses at fifty-seven pounds. After he’d strung three more racquets from the backlog, he felt calm enough to dial Judy, and now here he was, waiting at his sister’s apartment in Asbury Park, still dazed.
Sitting on the stoop, he watched car after car on her street, tires cutting waves through the heavy rain. He could still remember when this part of Main Street was a simple neighborhood street, no double yellow lines down the middle, kids playing street hockey even around rush hour. It was a sport he’d played himself, though always as the goalie, the solitary sentry. Even in team sports, he always found a way to be alone. Was this a trait passed down to him from his unknown father? It felt as if his life so far had been someone else’s.
At two o’clock, Kevin decided he had watched enough of the falling rain. To pass the time, he climbed over the railing to straighten up his sister’s patio. Unlike her neighbor’s, hers was a mess, so much so that he had a hard time figuring where to start. To gain some room, Kevin picked up little piles of newspapers and magazines off the ground; one issue of People dated back a couple years, the cover story featuring two Britney Spearses, one fat, one thin. Once he had them all stacked against the brick wall, he felt more in control, not only of the immediate surroundings but of his own life. So his father was somebody else, and his parents didn’t want him to know. It was big, but he could handle it. He’d just ask his dad about it, and his dad would apologize and tell Kevin the real story. Simple as that, no big deal, life goes on.
After sweeping up the floor, he went to work on the green plastic table and the two plastic Adirondack chairs. In the corner next to the rusted charcoal grill, Kevin found a sun-faded box of trash bags, so he plucked one out and filled it up with empty beer bottles, sticky plastic cups, and almost-empty bags of soggy potato chips that were crowding the tabletop. On one chair were more magazines and newspapers while the other supported a Jenga-inspired tower of pizza boxes. The last time Kevin saw a disaster like this was back in college, when he’d shared an apartment with three other guys, though he had to admit, Judy trumped even the combined entropy of three male nineteen-year-olds. When he was through, he had filled two trash bags to the top, barely able to tie the knots to keep the contents from spilling out.
She hadn’t bothered to draw her vertical blinds, so he cupped his hands and leaned against the balcony window. Not surprisingly, the chaos wasn’t limited to the patio. It was actually worse inside, her clothes lying twisted and crumpled everywhere—on the carpeted floor, off the armchair—a sleeve of a shirt desperately clinging onto the finial of a lamp. By the shapes and locations of her discarded clothing, he could guess the actions that precipitated their final repose. Next to the torch lamp was a pair of shorts she had simply dropped and stepped out of, the two holes for her legs looking back at him with fuzzy brown carpet eyes. Skin-colored pantyhose, peeled away after a tiring day of brain-dead temp work, hung limply off the back of her loveseat. Food-encrusted dishes competed for real estate on her coffee table, and an open pizza box with two slices remaining was balanced on top of the television set.
This is how his sister lived, and Kevin felt sorry for her, which was how he felt whenever he visited. A coverless pillow and a frayed blanket were haphazardly piled and pushed against one corner of the sofa, which meant she was still sleeping on the couch. She started doing that when Brian moved out, but that was more than a year ago. As far as he was concerned, Judy was about six months behind in breaking out of her funk. An ex-husband could no longer be an excuse for her to just let things go like this. He knew this better than anyone; when Alice left their house, the hardest part for him was getting used to sleeping alone, accepting her vacancy as the new normal. He would wake up in the middle of night, his hands scrabbling for her body and finding nothing, like a tongue probing at the hollow of a pulled tooth.
It was now a quarter past two. Kevin sat down in one of the chairs and took in the parking lot of the apartment and the row of tall evergreens blocking the view of the strip mall beyond. Rain fell, the soaking kind that came down all day long, the beat of the raindrops so steady that it faded into the background.
What it means is that your father is not your biological father.
Not a big deal? Who the fuck was he fooling? This was the single most devastating news he’d heard in his life. Not the most difficult—that honor would go to the doctor who announced with sociopathic dispassion that his mother had advanced colon cancer and would at best last a year. How Kevin had wanted to choke him so he’d never be able to speak again.
Kevin had trouble even thinking about his recent unpleasant discovery for any length of time. Every time he recalled Dr. Elias’s words, other thoughts pushed them out and took their place, like his mother’s death or the state of his sister’s living room or the sad dissolution of his own marriage. A time like this was when you most needed the support and guidance of your partner, but Alice was no longer a part of his life. Like Judy’s Brian, she, too, would forever be referred to with the ex prefix. Both he and his sister became single again within just months of each other—how the hell did something like that happen?
He heard Judy’s car before he saw it, the loud whine of the exhaust preceding the squeal of the brakes. There was a hole in her muffler, and although Kevin had referred her to his mechanic, even offered to pay for it, she hadn’t done it. By the way the car jerked to a stop, Kevin knew she’d put it into park without stopping fully, a terrible habit he’d railed against for God only knew how long. Judy emerged from the driver’s side door and sprinted in his direction without an umbrella, her footsteps splashing up rainwater, like a child running through a puddle.
3
“Are you laughing?”
She knew her brother was getting mad, but Judy couldn’t help it. The more serious and pissed he got—sitting on one of the two chairs in the dining room, his hands slowly curling into fists—the funnier it seemed. Kevin got up so quickly that the chair almost fell over backward.
“Wait, no,” Judy said, walking out of the kitchen. She grabbed his arm and turned him around. He’d played the protective part of the older brother on occasion, but surprises threw him. The grimace he now wore looked identical to the one she saw when he received the letter from USC saying he didn’t receive the tennis scholarship he was certain he would get. That was more than twenty years ago, but it was strange how memory worked like that, picking out the scenes from the dusty archives of the brain and making them fresh.
The news he told of his phone call from Dr. Elias was funny, at least to her. Because the first thing that came to her mind was what her dad used to say to her whenever she screwed up:
Why you not like your brother?
The answer now was very simple, and it was fucking hilarious.
Kevin, after listening
to her explanation, disagreed. “It’s not funny at all,” he said, and he sat back down hard, the feet of the chair scraping against the floor. “There’s nothing even remotely funny about any of this.”
Judy stood behind him and kneaded his tense shoulders until they loosened somewhat. His right was bigger than his left, years of cranking those super-fast tennis serves.
“Are you hungry?” she asked.
“What?”
“I don’t know about you, but I’m starving. It’s like almost three o’clock, isn’t it?”
“I could eat. I guess.”
She stepped back into the kitchen and announced she’d make a ham and cheese sandwich, but the contents of her refrigerator refused to comply with her plans. The ham was a month beyond the expiration date, and in the side compartment, all she had was spray cheese in a can. A jar of strawberry jelly sat at the bottommost shelf on the door, its mouth crusted with dried-up goo. She still had half a bag of whole wheat bread in the freezer, she knew that much for sure. Outside of a six-pack of beer and an open can of Beefaroni, there was nothing else edible in there.
Judy handed him a bottle of beer. “How about a nice PBJ instead?”
Kevin shrugged, twisted the bottle open, and chugged down a third of it with one swig. She placed another one on the table for him.
After rooting through her cabinets, Judy found no trace of peanut butter. Brian was the one who’d enjoyed the occasional PBJ, so after he left, she had neither the occasion nor the inclination to buy another.
“No PB, just J,” she said.
“Whatever,” he said. He was already on his second beer.
Judy pulled the bread out of the freezer and pried apart four frozen slices. If Kevin still had Alice in his life, he probably wouldn’t even be here, but this was something, wasn’t it? She, his little sister, was the person he wanted to talk to, not his best friend, Bill, and it made her feel good. This was what being family was all about. Maybe all those miserable Thanksgivings and Christmases she’d endured weren’t in vain.
At the same time, she felt a little jealous. Nothing would make her happier than to find out that she had no blood relations to her father, but as usual, it was Kevin who was blessed with good fortune. She didn’t mean to belittle his crisis here—after all, waking up one day to find out that your parents lied to you about something as significant as this would fuck up anybody, especially at age forty—but still, why couldn’t it have been her?
The toaster dinged. She slathered on the gelatinous goop with a steak knife, the smell of preserved strawberries as strong as bubble gum. She brought the sandwiches out to the table and sat down next to him with her own bottle of beer.
“Remember how when we were kids, people used to say I looked like Dad while you looked like Mom?”
“Yeah. I never thought much of it.”
“My bet is on Pastor Kim,” Judy said.
“What?”
“If we’re playing the ‘Who’s your daddy’ game. Mom always had a thing for him.”
“Wishful thinking on your part. I think it was you who had a thing for him.”
“Every girl has her Thorn Birds fantasy.”
Kevin bit into the sandwich. The extra jelly squeezed out from one end and plopped onto his dish. To compensate for the lack of peanut butter, she’d put on too much, but her brother didn’t notice. “I don’t think it was anything like that.”
As much as Judy wanted to believe otherwise, he was probably right. Though if there was anybody who deserved to be cheated on, it was her father, who’d had the audacity to carry on an affair while his wife was dying.
“Nothing’s changed, you know,” Judy said. “You’re still you.”
“I don’t know why they never told me.”
“Are you going to ask him?”
He nodded vaguely, then snapped into focus. “You weren’t there at the transplant orientation.”
“I was busy,” she said, trying not to sound defensive, but it still came out that way. She had never considered going in the first place, but she hadn’t wanted to argue with Kevin, and she didn’t want to argue now. “I called you, didn’t I?”
Kevin shook his head. “I don’t care about that. I’ve just been so scatterbrained that I forgot to tell you that I can’t give him my kidney.”
“You were going to donate your kidney?”
He looked at her as if she were the dumbest person in the world. “How the hell do you think I found out about all this? I was getting tested for compatibility.”
“Well, you didn’t tell me that.”
“I didn’t?”
“No.”
Kevin put the sandwich down. “Shit, I’m sorry.”
“It’s all right,” she said, and she genuinely felt for him. She might’ve hated her father, but at least she knew who he was. Maybe she wouldn’t be so delighted if she were in her brother’s shoes after all.
“So, are you going to get tested?” he asked.
“What do you mean?”
“Well, if I can’t give him one of mine,” he said, sounding less sure as he continued, “don’t you think maybe you could?”
Judy stared at him evenly. “I’d sooner give my kidney to a stranger.”
“Judy—”
She stepped into the power of her anger, embraced it, drew strength from it. “I’d carve it out myself and throw it into the river before he ever sees it.”
“Come on—”
“He killed her!”
Then silence. She watched her brother’s stare. He was having difficulty believing what he’d heard, and Judy wasn’t entirely sure just how or when those three words had assembled themselves in the language department of her brain. It was almost as if the thought had come after she’d spoken. She’d always blamed her father for her mother’s death, but Judy had never put it so bluntly, and the funny thing was, she hadn’t even been thinking about her mother—at least not consciously. Her mother was never very far away, right below the surface of the mind. One little touch was all it took to disturb the illusive calm and reveal the fury that burned beneath.
“Okay,” Kevin said. He drained the rest of his second beer and got up. “All right.”
Judy sat down and couldn’t think of anything to say, so she took a bite out of the sandwich. It was awful. The bread had an aftertaste of old ice cubes, and there was entirely too much jelly, the sweetness overpowering. She swallowed just to get it the hell away from her tongue.
“I’m gonna go,” Kevin said.
“Yeah.”
As he opened the door and was about to walk through it, he turned and said, “I think he did the best he could.”
Wasn’t good enough, she said to herself.
And yet something collapsed in her when the door closed and she heard the quiet click of the latch. She ran out to her patio and yelled after her brother, who was walking to his car, soaked by the rain that was now coming down hard. She would’ve given him her umbrella if she knew where it was.
“I’ll! Call! You!”
“Okay!” Kevin yelled back, and she watched him go. You’re still you, she’d told him. Easy for her to say. She wished she’d told him something smarter. As she watched his red lights fade into the dark afternoon, she heard the phone ringing in the apartment.
“Judy?”
“Yeah?” The voice was familiar but she couldn’t place it.
“It’s Roger.”
“From the office.”
“Yeah.”
She sat down, sipped her beer, and waited for him to continue.
“Is this a good time to call? I mean you’re not in the middle of anything?”
“I’m good,” she said.
“The bird in the lead,” Roger said in a distant, self-conscious voice that sounded as if he was reading from a textbook, “the one that’s at the forward point of the V formation, is working the hardest by being the first to break through the air, which offers resistance to its flight. Just as a boat leaves a
V-shaped wake of smoother water behind it, the lead bird leaves a V-shaped wake of smoother air behind it. The lead bird creates a trail of air turbulence that helps lift along the V-shaped direction, so it’s easier for the other birds to fly in the wake of the lead bird. If you watch a V-formation carefully, you’ll notice that the lead bird does not stay in that position for very long and will drop back into the formation, while another, not-as-tired bird takes the lead, breaking through the air first.”
Judy smiled. “Thank you,” she said.
“You’re welcome.”
“How did you get my number?”
“I know the guy at HR.”
“You couldn’t ask me for it?”
“No,” he said, “I guess not.”
Judy closed her eyes and bit her lower lip. She was doing it again, saying the wrong things. “That was a joke. I was only kidding.”
“I’m beginning to understand that,” Roger said, and it made her laugh. “Do you want to have dinner with me sometime?”
They agreed to meet the next evening at Gaetano’s, an Italian restaurant in Red Bank they both knew.
After she hung up the phone, Judy finished her beer and opened another.
“Cheers,” she said to the room, and she clinked her bottle with the three empty ones on the table, the last one with enough gusto to topple it over. It was Friday night, after all, and tomorrow she had a date. But then she remembered her brother turning around in the middle of her parking lot, his face wet with rain. The box she’d brought back from work was still inside her car, but she didn’t need to see the framed photograph to remember it. She and Kevin were holding hands, squinting against the sun as they smiled for the camera, with hope and innocence only youth could justify.
4
Nothing impressed the beginners more than his serve, but like cars and computers and airplanes and anything else that seemed complicated, when broken down to its component parts, the magic was just good, fundamental execution. There was the toss, where Kevin held the fuzzy little ball with his fingertips, raising his arm straight as if he were a statue and letting the ball go at the apex of the lift with a touch of spin. For most amateur players, what they saw at this moment was a yellow, round object hanging momentarily in midair, but for Kevin, who’d tossed up a tennis ball like this since he was eleven years old, the open space above him was as closed and limited as the inside of a closet. When the ball reached the top right corner, he’d draw his feet together, pull his racquet from his arched backside with his thumb on the fifth strip of his grip, and spin and strike the ball on the unpainted hole inside the giant P printed on his racquet. During his college years, he would hit the exact same quadrant of squares on the grid of his strings, the joined corners accruing a bright green filigree that he’d happily pick out between points.